Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1438 Editor's Choice: 20
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Anonymous Tilde
[Read the article: How much is that subprime-linked CDO in the window?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No. That's not actually the case. No one does. It's at best a wild ass guess and a hope. In fact the mechanics of these things run counter to predictability.
Red herring.
The fact is, there is no absolute risk/return valuation to any financial instrument because while the return side is specified and is definite, the risk part of the equation is always statistical and indefinite and is never zero.
The point is that the opacity of these financial instruments has a purpose, and that is to enable a flim-flam. The practice should be illegal.
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Duke of URL
[Read the article: When Rudy goes waterboarding]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How can these people make such pronouncements in such ignorance?
It's not ignorance. It's evasion. Whenever right-wingers get stuck with a question they don't want to answer (when campaigning or when facing a criminal investigation) they play the Stupid Defense. They pretend they're idiots, which plays well with real idiots who identify closely with stupidity and think they're voting for one of their own.
Reagan was a master of the Stupid Defense during the Iran-Contra investigations. To be fair though, it's possible that senile dementia was already well along by that time. Still, Reagan established that utter witlessness is an effective political tactic.
They all do it. Rumsfeld was always completely out of the loop when asked about Pentagon scandal by congressional investigators, and Gonzales was a complete kneebiter when asked about torture and illegal spying. And they mostly got away with it.
Cheney: "Suckers!"
Dubya: "I'm a low-grade moron. Ask anybody."
"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."
- John Stuart Mill
"Bush's appeal is, after all, to the stupid. They, too, are inflexible - they also know that maintaining one's stupidity can become a kind of strength, provided you never change your mind."
- Norman Mailer, New York Review of Books
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We haven't failed to notice
[Read the article: Hitlers, Hitlers and more Hitlers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That it's the lunatic right-wing fringe, like NorPod, that's advocating war and genocide. Not the Iranians.
His "Hitler Hitler Hitler" mantra is more than just the usual right-wing fearmongering the chickenhawks use to cultivate cowardice, which is needed in the general population to successfully promote warmongering. That's the old Nazi tactic that Goering was so fond of.
But it's also the political version of projection, the attempt to cover over one's deficiencies and negative characteristics by attributing them to the intended victims: it's the Bushites who are the vicious fascists bent on world domination. They have said so. The Iranians very simply lack the capability and have no such imperial intentions. Quite unlike the Bushites, who have both and would really prefer it if you didn't notice.
Pubs have been getting away with this projection tactic with libruls and Democrats for years. Somehow the Democrats possess not only their own bad characteristics, but all the Republicans' bad chacteristics as well. Somehow it's not the neocons who are the radical right-wingers - it's those "leftists". Right-wing radicals really say these things. I kid you not.
Somehow it's the Democrats who are the 'fiscally irresponsible' ones, when it's the Republicans, and not the Democrats, who always run up the National Debt. Pubs don't run budget surpluses, but Dems do.
And so forth. There are many examples.
Not-so-strangely enough, it's Iran the Bushites have targeted, and not Pakistan, even though Pakistan is much more dangerous than Iran. The difference is that Pakistan is our "ally", while Iran has somehow neglected to give Bush's oil monopoly buddies control over their oil industries. If the Iranians just did that there would be no problem with letting them have The Bomb, just as the neocons have no problem with a long list of other ugly third-world types, in the Republican tradition. It's quite okay to be a repressive or brutal Asian dictatorship so long as you're Bush's "friend".
Neocons are characterized by hypocrisy at least as much as by lying. They try to keep a balance between the two. With projection they go all out.
NorPod's really no good by himself. He should think about getting The Klan or some skinheads to warm up for him.
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That's right. Clapton is not God
[Read the article: Clapton is not God]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Jimmy Page is God.
Clapton can't improvise. Never could. Everything he ever played was and is rehearsed to death. Why do you suppose they call him "Slow Hand"? All right - don't believe me. Ask him yourself. Or ask Jeff Beck. He'll tell you.
But Rolling Stone liked Clapton and never liked Page, and it took them years before they got around to giving Page a grudging respect. And yet, every top rock guitarist after him wanted to be Page: Eddie Van Halen, Kurt Cobain, Angus Young, Kirk Hammett, everybody except Stevie Ray Vaughn, who wanted to be Hendrix. They don't mention Clapton. Clapton lifted half his best licks from other guitarists, like Eddie Cochrane, Robert Johnson, or Duane Allman for Layla. Ask Greg - he knows about that one. Clapton went to the Ritchie Blackmore School of Rock Guitar Composition: steal from everybody.
Who do you think Clapton learned guitar from? Uh huh. Page. Clapton never made a secret of it until after 1966.
Page could do things with a guitar that other guitarists could not do, not even Hendrix, and still cannot do.
Keith Richards is not God either, because even he'll admit that he's a Chuck Berry clone. Steve Howe is God but nobody noticed. The less about Ted Nugent the better.